Dr. Chattopadhyay is an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of the British empire. As a professor in the Department of Art History at UC, Santa Barbara, she is one of the most theoretically innovative historians of Asian architecture and urbanism working today.
Chattopadhyay’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, three fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies, a J. Paul Getty Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Grant, a Fellowship from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, a Distinguished Visiting Fellowship from Queen Mary, University of London, a Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities Fellowship, University of London, and the Society of Architectural Historian’s Founder’s Award.
Chattopadhyay is a Founding Editor of the online journal Platform, and has served as a director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a University of California Multi-campus Research Group, and as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). In 2018, she was named as a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians for a lifetime of significant contributions to the field.
Chattopadhyay is the author of Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023); Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012); and Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005; paperback 2006). She has co-edited two books with Jeremy White: Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Taylor and Francis, 2019); and City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge, 2014).
